Investigation of wall bounded flows using SPH and the unified semi-analytical wall boundary conditions

TL;DR

This paper investigates semi-analytical wall boundary conditions in SPH, addressing energy conservation issues, introducing extensions, and validating improvements through numerical experiments including free-surface flows and dam break simulations.

Contribution

It introduces novel extensions to semi-analytical wall boundary conditions in SPH, improving accuracy and stability, especially for free-surface flows and volume flux control.

Findings

Volume flux errors reduced by 5 orders of magnitude

Robin boundary conditions correctly imposed with order-dependent error

Enhanced free-surface behavior and stability in dam break simulations

Abstract

The semi-analytical wall boundary conditions present a mathematically rigorous framework to prescribe the influence of solid walls in SPH for fluid flows. In this paper they are investigated with respect to the skew-adjoint property which implies exact energy conservation. It will be shown that this property holds only in the limit of the continuous SPH approximation, whereas in the discrete SPH formulation it is only approximately true, leading to numerical noise. This noise, interpreted as form of "turbulence", is treated using an additional volume diffusion term in the continuity equation which we show is equivalent to an approximate Riemann solver. Subsequently two extensions to the boundary conditions are presented. The first dealing with a variable driving force when imposing a volume flux in a periodic flow and the second showing a generalization of the wall boundary condition to Robin type and arbitrary-order interpolation. Two modifications for free-surface flows are presented for the volume diffusion term as well as the wall boundary condition. In order to validate the theoretical constructs numerical experiments are performed showing that the present volume flux term yields results with an error 5 orders of magnitude smaller then previous methods while the Robin boundary conditions are imposed correctly with an error depending on the order of the approximation. Furthermore, the proposed modifications for free-surface flows improve the behaviour at the intersection of free surface and wall as well as prevent free-surface detachment when using the volume diffusion term. Finally, this paper is concluded by a simulation of a dam break over a wedge demonstrating the improvements proposed in this paper.